The Price of Malice by Archer Mayor

here, and to questions that she’d never shared with anyone—questions that had to do with how all the Silvas had eventually turned out, including the two who would never again speak for themselves.
    “Your father and me went back a long way,” Harry said ambiguously.
    “So do you and I,” she said, smiling.
    He thought about that. “Fair enough,” he said. “So, maybe we know why you’re here. The question is, what do you want?”
    She leaned forward, watching him closely. “What was my dad up to, Harry? What was he doing?”
    Harry dodged at first—a creature of habit. “The day he disappeared? Fishing, I thought. He was a lobsterman.”
    “And when he wasn’t?”
    Harry pressed his lips together momentarily before answering vaguely, “They all dabble a bit. You know that. Didn’t Abílo ever put a short lobster on the table?”
    “No,” she said pointedly.
    “Huh,” he muttered.
    “Short lobsters wasn’t his game,” she said.
    “Right,” he agreed.
    “So, what was?”
    Harry rubbed his index alongside his nose. “The man’s dead. Who cares?”
    Lyn kept her eyes on him. “You’re looking at her.”
    “Why?”
    “My family’s in the toilet and I want to know why. I have a brother who thought he never could live up to his brother and father, and now he’s not sure if they weren’t worse than he ever was. My mother’slike a walking dead woman because the fantasy she buried at sea has come back to bite her in the form of a perfectly preserved boat. As a kid, I worshipped my father, Harry. He was everything a man was supposed to be, and maybe because of that, no man I could find as a young woman ever measured up. But now . . .”
    He reached out and grabbed her forearm, his expression hard. “Don’t you go back on that. Abílo was one of the best of us.”
    “Not toward the end,” she insisted stubbornly.
    “Maybe not,” he relented, “but that’s not how he should be judged.”
    She put her hand on top of his. “Then
tell
me, Harry. I mean, for Christ’s sake, the genie’s out of the bottle. You’re saying the truth’s not as bad as what’s going on in my head, but I don’t know the truth. And my mom and Steve don’t, either. And if you’re right about Steve, what he thinks is liable to get him into really hot water, ’cause he’s got no heroes left.”
    She shifted in her seat. “You wanted to know what happened to José and Dad. I can’t answer that, but I do know the boat was found two hundred miles up the coast, on a privately owned island, hidden in a boathouse, with all its markings painted over.”
    “Whose island?”
    “I wasn’t told,” she lied. “I have a friend who’s a cop, and that’s all he told me. Why was the boat that far away, Harry? What were they doing, almost in Canadian waters?”
    He wavered, staring at the bottle before him. “If you don’t know that, you’re not as smart as I thought.”
    She let him go and sat back, her face ashen. “Drugs?”
    This time, he leaned toward her, his expression intense. “
No
. No way.”
    One of the nearby pool players glanced at them. Harry gave him a glare, making him move away.
    Harry lowered his voice. “Your father was no drug dealer.”
    “I didn’t say he was a
dealer
,” she reacted.
    He waved a hand angrily. “I don’t give a flying fuck, okay? He wasn’t into that shit.”
    “So what was it, then?”
    “Stuff. What do I know?”
    “You
know
, Harry,” she said in a forceful whisper. “He would’ve come to you, like I’m doing now. You’re like my uncle, for crying out loud. You two were the brothers neither one of you ever had. My dad came to you and asked how he could make ends meet, right? Isn’t that what happened?”
    Harry merely nodded, studying the tabletop.
    “But what I don’t get,” she continued, “is we never saw any of that. He and José kept going out, and they kept catching lobster. Where was the money going, that they needed more?”
    Harry sighed and